Nehalem is up and running with 8 cores, 16 threads

Nehalem will launch towards the end of 2008 with an eight-core product that has 16 threads in total.

During this morning's keynote, Intel CEO Paul Otellini revealed that the company's next generation architecture is on track for the end of 2008.

He hailed the design as "a very dynamic design from a number of perspectives."

From Intel's perspective, Otellini said that Nehalem is a very modular design, and from the developers' standpoint, it's also very dynamic too. He said that developers will be able to turn cores, caches and threads on and off.

Nehalem will launch with an eight core product in 2008, however each core will have two threads, making a total of 16 threads on a single CPU package. The design was completed just a few weeks ago and will feature 731 million transistors.

Glenn Hinton, Chief Nehalem architect and Intel Fellow, said that Nehalem is a higher performing design than the Core architecture.

His team spent a lot of time improving single threaded performance and, in order to enable this, the design has a very strong focus on power efficiency - so much so that it's even more efficient than the Core microarchitecture.

The design includes a high-performance integrated memory controller, known as the Quick Path Memory Controller, which allows for very scalable bandwidth in memory bandwidth intensive scenarios.

Additionally, the design features a technology known as Quick Path Interconnect, which allows Intel to make very high performance scalable interconnects.

Despite the design only being complete three weeks ago, it's already up and running. A demo PC running Windows XP was shown. When Otellini walked over towards it, it woke up, saying "Hello Paul, I am Nehalem." Otellini also revealed that Nehalem has also successfully booted OS10 too.

When I was new to modding I modded the whole startup to supply a greeting...it gets old fast, trust me. On the subject of 8 cores, wow! But the cynic in me wonders how long it will take for most software to take advantage?